Your Organized Religion is an Insult to Humanity

A British teacher in Sudan asked one of her 7-year-old students to bring in her teddy bear to teach them about animals. She then asked the students to pick a name for the bear and they voted to name it Muhammad. These last weeks she was arrested and convicted for letting them use the name and will be punished with 40 lashes. On Friday (11/30/07), after a reduction in sentencing to 15 days in jail and deportation, thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied in a central square and demanded her execution.

Now the first response is to call this law and these people primitive, but the problem is much deeper than that. This is not a problem with the current division in Islam or any other religion that has its evangelicals, hard-liners, or extremists. This is a problem with organized religion.

When you create a set of laws and call them infallible, you are doing so under the belief that the people, culture, technology, and science will never change. The commonly held belief is that during the new religions inception is that humanity has reached a final destination or perfection that needs to be maintained. This thought process is usually fostered by a powerful group of people who want to preserve their comfortable control over a population. The development of the new religious laws is usually a regurgitation of previous controls and stories from other popular religions into a new form to suit their needs. If not for that reason, religions are instituted to herald in a new form of government or to change direction in a current one.

The insulting part is not that the masses fall into this trap and can made to believe that silent obedience is the way to some sort of existential fulfillment in an afterlife. No, it’s the sheer nerve of them to put forth the belief that there is an ability to understand the universe. As if simply using our limited minds and current understanding of the complexity of the cosmos is enough to explain everything. So what organized religions are offering is easy answers that are destined to be outdated and laughable before they are instituted. It takes blind faith in these dogmas to overlook the obvious inconsistencies and inaccurateness that they contain.

Spirituality is one thing, and is different for everyone, but to believe in one version of a religion over all others is not only foolish, it’s self-defeating. If you put all of your hope into something that can so easily fail, you will bound to become either blind to reality or disappointed with life.

The alternative? Believe in yourself. The strength you have to follow the dogma of an organized religion is the same strength that you can use to just be a good person. And you know what a good person is because every single religion, community, and historical reference to good acts mirrors each other. Be good, you have that power within yourself. Or to quote Abraham Lincoln, “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”